What the Barkandji People did not anticipate, however, was that the struggle to have their water rights respected, recognised and protected, including within NSW water management regimes, was only just beginning. Seeking to raise awareness about their river health concerns and generate government action, Barkandji Traditional Owners have organised and attended several rallies and protests in towns along the Darling River and even in Canberra over the past two years.

Water management is an especially contentious issue in Australia, especially in the state of NSW which has some of our most over-allocated water systems. Here, and in other parts of Australia, unsustainable farming practices and prolonged overuse of water has caused significant ecological degradation to rivers and wetlands.

In recent decades, Australian governments have attempted to ameliorate this environmental degradation by introducing mechanisms like capping water extractions and returning water to the environment.

The Barkandji’s native title claim overlaps with five of these Water Sharing Plans, all of which contain explicit provisions allowing them to be updated if and when a native title determination is handed down. To date, however, no Plan has been amended despite the Barkandji now being established legally recognised native title holders for over two and a half years.

Significantly, one of these Plans was introduced one year afterthe Barkandji native title claim was determined. Yet, this Plan states: ‘At the commencement of this Plan, there are no native title rights in these water sources.’

In our research article, we draw from the Barkandji People’s struggles in engaging with water regimes to analyse the outcomes of Aboriginal water claims more broadly. We reveal that these attempts at recognition can have problematic outcomes, whether intended by governments or not. We characterise these outcomes as ‘misrecognition’ and ‘non-recognition’ and describe the associated implications for Aboriginal peoples. The paper calls for more scrutiny of government implementation of the measures designed to protect native title.

This work appeared in the open-access journal Resources. You can read the full research article here.